An Ethiopian ( Derg) Campaign medal

[Ulsterman]

Test2. Trying the iPad upload app. Note this veteran , who earned a title akin to knighthood for battlefield bravery, used the same ribbon for the UN medal where the others wore out. Ribbons do not seem to last long in Ethiopia. his life story is in the excellent book, ' Ethiopian Patriots.' he also was awarded the St. George medal for bravery for single handidly taking out an Italian machine gun. later the Emperor gave him several acres of land for his service. note also his British war medals, denoting he was part of the exiled group of Patriots who crossed the border and attacked with the Gondor force.

Edited March 29, 2013 by Ulsterman

[congobrown]

Test2. Trying the iPad upload app. Note this veteran , who earned a title akin to knighthood for battlefield bravery, used the same ribbon for the UN medal where the others wore out. Ribbons do not seem to last long in Ethiopia. his life story is in the excellent book, ' Ethiopian Patriots.' he also was awarded the St. George medal for bravery for single handidly taking out an Italian machine gun. later the Emperor gave him several acres of land for his service. note also his British war medals, denoting he was part of the exiled group of Patriots who crossed the border and attacked with the Gondor force.

Do I assume that is an ONUC medal on the wrong ribbon to the left of his Congo Service Medal?

[Ulsterman]

yup.

by the way, where did you find the Dragomir article? I have looked everywhere.

[congobrown]

I have to say that it was a little while ago and I can't remember where I found it and I haven't been able to find it again. Perhaps it has been taken down. I had copied it onto a hard drive but that has been playing up. I put it into a computer shop in London a week or so ago to see what they could recover. Transitting through London today, I dropped in to see how they were doing in recovering my data only to be told that the hard drive was a write off. Along with 160,000 tracks of iTunes I have lost the this article as well as much else. Not a great day!

[oamotme]

Tim,

Aaargh, this happened to me two years ago and lost some 2 years of data - fortunately I had my previous computer hard drive & a number of memory sticks but still lost 2 years of family photos. I now have 2 back up drives.

I attach images of two Derg medals:

"Honoured Education Professional" - diameter 47.8 mm & 38.1 grammes - it has lost the "ribbon" element of the suspension brooch, 36.3mm x 16.4mm. Perhaps this medal is the successor to the Haile Selassie Teacher Long Service medals?

"Resistance Medal" - mentioned earlier in the previous "Ethiopia" thread, which I obtained from a European dealer. I think the link may be a replacement, but on looking at other medals of this style perhaps not, but not sure and I have no idea as to the ribbon colour. Dimensions - diameter 35mm & 26.2 grammes; brooch 42mm. Ulsterman notes "insanely rare" - I am still looking for the Haile Selassie version! Any suggestions.....?

Kind regards,

Owain.

Edited April 5, 2013 by oamotme

[Ulsterman]

wow! the teacher medals are Still awarded today! I believe the ribbon for the Imperial medal and the contemporary medal is the red,yellow,green national colors. the ethiopian teachers guild has a website, in English that mentions these long service medals.

The resistance medal is amazingly rare and the more I read I am beginning to think it was only awarded to a select few in Addis and other cities in 1949-1951 or so. Patriots who fought in the countryside all got the Patriots medal.

I got my imperial resistance medal off ebay. They show up about once every six months or so and often are in Mappin and Webb boxes.

[oamotme]

I will keep my eyes peeled for the imperial resistance medals - sooner or later one will appear - wanting one now will not make it happen any sooner! I found an Ethiopian Teachers Association site which referred to a 60th anniversary medal for the Association but no reference for long service awards. It is not clear from the modern issue I llustrated above whether it is a long service or merit award. The imperial issue all have a number for the years served - 10, 20, or 30 if I recall correctly. Regards, Owain

[congobrown]

I am having a frustrating time with IT away from home. This morning I photographed my 3 'Honoured Education Professional' medals as illustrated by Owain three posts above. My laptop will not recognise my camera so I can't download them. They are now sitting on the desktop of my wife's laptop pending an opportunity to move them. As I sit in Tim Horton's in the backwoods of Quebec I am finding it all a bit of a struggle.

I have the 'gold', silver and bronze. All three have the same script on the reverse and so there seems to be no indication of length of servoce for each. The ribbons are intact on all three and is predominantly dark blue (19 mm) with green yellow and red stripes at the border with the green on the outside at both ends. The red and yellow stripes are 2 mm each but the green is more like 3 mm but this could just be because of the way that the ribbon is made.

I will upload the photos as soon as I am technically able as well as the other Teachers Medals that I have (Ulsterman - you are right in that the ribbons for the latter are red, yellow and green.

Tim

[peter monahan]

"wow! the teacher medals are Still awarded today! I believe the ribbon for the Imperial medal and the contemporary medal is the red,yellow,green national colors. the ethiopian teachers guild has a website, in English that mentions these long service medals."

As a retired teacher, I'm all for that! In my next life I want to teach in Finland, where people who aren't good enough to get into teachers' college have to settle for medicine or law!

Seriously, I wonder if the apparently short life of ribbons on Ethiopian medals is a reflection of the climate or whether they are worn on a more regular basis than is common in the West. I know that in the old USSR, war veterans wore their gongs a lot, perhaps even daily in some cases and, I assume, would have to replace ribbons and suspenders far more often than the lads down at the Royal Canadian Legion here in Canada, who probably air theirs no more than 4-5 times a year.

I'm also not a bit surprised that the correct ribbons are not used as replacements. What tailor in Addis, in his right mind, would have kept rolls of ribbon for Haile Selassie's medals when the Marxists were in power and stomping hard on any vestiges of the old regime? There's a project for someone: locate or have made the correct ribbons and devise a method or organization by which they were made available to Ethiopian vets. Alas, unlikely.

Great photos. Please keep up the posts!

BTW, Congobrown, how does a resident [?] of Kenya wind up in the backwoods of Quebec? Enquiring minds want to know!

Peter

Edited April 9, 2013 by peter monahan

[congobrown]

"wow! the teacher medals are Still awarded today! I believe the ribbon for the Imperial medal and the contemporary medal is the red,yellow,green national colors. the ethiopian teachers guild has a website, in English that mentions these long service medals."

As a retired teacher, I'm all for that! In my next life I want to teach in Finland, where people who aren't good enough to get into teachers' college have to settle for medicine or law!

Seriously, I wonder if the apparently short life of ribbons on Ethiopian medals is a reflection of the climate or whether they are worn on a more regular basis than is common in the West. I know that in the old USSR, war veterans wore their gongs a lot, perhaps even daily in some cases and, I assume, would have to replace ribbons and suspenders far more often than the lads down at the Royal Canadian Legion here in Canada, who probably air theirs no more than 4-5 times a year.

I'm also not a bit surprised that the correct ribbons are not used as replacements. What tailor in Addis, in his right mind, would have kept rolls of ribbon for Haile Selassie's medals when the Marxists were in power and stomping hard on any vestiges of the old regime? There's a project for someone: locate or have made the correct ribbons and devise a method or organization by which they were made available to Ethiopian vets. Alas, unlikely.

Great photos. Please keep up the posts!

BTW, Congobrown, how does a resident [?] of Kenya wind up in the backwoods of Quebec? Enquiring minds want to know!

Peter

I married the enemy!

Thinking about it, the ribbon for the Teachers Medal that I have described above is a dead ringer for the Medal of the patriot Refugees (Exile Medal). Recycling ribbons may be in vogue?

Tim

[Ulsterman]

Hmmmmmm.....I was googling Ethiopian teachers medal a few months ago when I came across the ETA site. I confess I never sent them an email, but did see articles about Long service medals being awarded.
There are a number of small but VERY interesting Ethiopian veterans societies out there. The largest one I have found is in the DC area and is the Harrar Military Academy Alumni Association. As a number of these elderly men fought for the Derg, they seem to be somewhat reticent about their experiences. Still, they will know the truth about these medals. One guy in DC, a pilot, won the Hero of Ethiopia" medal.
The surviving Patriot vets in Ethiopia need everything, even minimal stuff, like food. The Patriots website, which seems to have been put up by a fellow amateur historian, does not respond to my emails. I'd feel better about sending some of these folks$100 or so if I knew it was actually going to get to some deserving ancient veteran.

Edited April 9, 2013 by Ulsterman

[Ulsterman]

This is the Resistance medal-

[oamotme]

Ahhhhhhhhhhh - very nice Ulsterman! I will bide my time and wait to see what appears on line in due course....deo volente! Owain

[Ulsterman]

Good Luck. they are actually so rare and obscure that when they appear, they are not a lot of money ( so far). Of course now that we have discussed them in an open forum.........

I speculate that these medals were awarded to Patriots in the late 1940s/early 1950s and that they were given primarily to those Ethiopian Patriots who were active in the secret underground Nationalist resistance societies like the famous intellectual Black Lion Group or the infamous Omoro Resistance Army.

The Italians occupied the major towns and cities of Ethiopia and unlike the countryside, which was constantly fought over throughout the occupation, the towns were pretty dangerous places to be in. Most of the major towns had bobbed wire fences and concrete pillboxes around them. After the attempted assassination of Graziano, the Black Shirt militias went on the rampage in Addis and many other places, killing thousands of innocents indiscriminately. Thousands of other intellectuals/elite /nobility were sent to Italy for Acculturation'.....e.g. Hostages. The underground in the cities were very brave people indeed and many were women.

[congobrown]

Images of Teachers Medals as promised although it would seem that I need to buy a better camera or steadier hands!

Tim

[Richard S]

Hello,

I have a very nice Military Academy Badge from Ethiopia:

[Ulsterman]

Nice! is there a makers' mark on the reverse at all? I know the Derg sent officers to Bulgaria, Hungary, the DDR, Cuba and Moscow for training and many wore their foreign academy badges.

Those teachers badges are splendid !

The top row I would wager a weeks' pay we're made in the DDR, as they look so similar to DDR awards.

[peter monahan]

^{It's always interesting to see who was friends with who, based on the style of military tailoring, award design and so on. No offence to My American brothers, but I have always thought that the US version of the pickelhaube [sp?], post Franco-Prussian War, was one of your army's less successful forays into head gear.}

^{Similarly, East bloc medals seem sadly lacking in imagination and artistic merit and it always pains me to see the lock step designs used by almost every nation with socialist leanings. On the flip side, so to speak, Our Canadian Prime Minister was in South America this past few days and reviewed one guard of honour wearing something which looked awfully like WWII vintage German helmets. I think it was in Peru but wasn't clever enough to check. The military academy badge is a lovely piece but the medals, not so much.}

[Richard S]

Hello Ulsterman,

here is the reverse of the badge:

[Lion101]

^{It's always interesting to see who was friends with who, based on the style of military tailoring, award design and so on. No offence to My American brothers, but I have always thought that the US version of the pickelhaube [sp?], post Franco-Prussian War, was one of your army's less successful forays into head gear.}

^{Similarly, East bloc medals seem sadly lacking in imagination and artistic merit and it always pains me to see the lock step designs used by almost every nation with socialist leanings. On the flip side, so to speak, Our Canadian Prime Minister was in South America this past few days and reviewed one guard of honour wearing something which looked awfully like WWII vintage German helmets. I think it was in Peru but wasn't clever enough to check. The military academy badge is a lovely piece but the medals, not so much.}

It would had been Chile since they are very very and I do mean very Germanic with their parades.

Edited November 12, 2013 by peter monahan

[Ulsterman]

as of yesterday I now have in my hands some very old Orden magazines, which outline the Derg promulgated medals of 1979. The Wound, bravery, national service and long service/merit medals are all detailed. the replacement/reissued imperial campaign medals are not, which I take as further proof that they were issued in the mid 1980s.

many thanks Bene Menti auctions!

[Colin Davie]

Can anyone help me with this group... not an area I know much about, what is the Asia type medal with the 2 shells?

Any help appreciated.

C

[oamotme]

Dear Colin, I believe it is the South Korea, Korean War medal. Ethiopian troops saw active service in Korea.Regards, Owain

[Colin Davie]

Thanks Owain, I had a quick flick on the net and see you are spot on, but appears the ribbon is wrong in the group example.

Thanks for the help... much appreciated.

C

[Ulsterman]

The picture is gone.

Note that the Editor of the OMSA database has re edited my original uploads for political reasons and possibly to coordinate with the mistaken identification used by a British- French medal dealer. The modern UN Service medal is definetly Owains' dove medal as shown and the Korean vets society have confirmed the three lozanges are a Derg reissue of the Korean War campaign medal. Apparently old silver ones were required to be handed in as Marxist silver confiscation, but this only happened around Addis.